Entourage 2008 - Palm Sync

[Adam Bailey]

- All-day calendar events duplicate like crazy (and this one looks like
it is an Apple issue)

For what it's worth, I've yet to experience this*. Using Entourage 2008 with
Missing Sync 6.0.2 under Mac OS X 10.4.11 to a Treo 650.

* The exception is that I get two of every birthday, presumably because one
is coming from Entourage and one from Address Book.app. Hasn't been a big
enough annoyance that I've bothered to try to diagnose.

 

[Art Shotwell]

For what it's worth, I've yet to experience this*. Using Entourage 2008 with
Missing Sync 6.0.2 under Mac OS X 10.4.11 to a Treo 650.

* The exception is that I get two of every birthday, presumably because one
is coming from Entourage and one from Address Book.app. Hasn't been a big
enough annoyance that I've bothered to try to diagnose.

Adam, I'm not sure about this, but here's an idea. Assuming you're using
sync services, open iCal and see what calendars & subscriptions are ticked
on the left. Uncheck as appropriate and re-sync. That -may- solve the
birthdays issue. Or, go to iSync and see what Calendars are ticked there
and adjust accordingly.

But, it appears we lack the ability to control what way data flows when
syncing. I'd like to be able to say it is okay to move one direction only.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

For what it's worth, I've yet to experience this*. Using Entourage 2008 with
Missing Sync 6.0.2 under Mac OS X 10.4.11 to a Treo 650.

FWIW too, I'm on 10.5.1, with the MIssing Sync 6.0.2 and a Clié TH-55.
Contacts duplciate like crazy in my address book.
If it is indeed a problem of Leopard, then that would point the finger
at Apple and not MS, but regardless of who is at fault here, I'm still
stuck without syncing.
(and I think it's important other people are aware of the potential
problems before they enable syncing).


Corentin

 

[adamb]

FWIW too, I'm on 10.5.1, with the MIssing Sync 6.0.2 and a Clié TH-55.
Contacts duplciate like crazy in my address book.
If it is indeed a problem of Leopard, then that would point the finger
at Apple and not MS, but regardless of who is at fault here, I'm still
stuck without syncing.

Is the conventional wisdom that the problem IS with Leopard?

I'm debating upgrading my machine, but I'll hold off if syncing isn't
going to work.

 

[Kerry]

Is the conventional wisdom that the problem IS with Leopard?

I'm debating upgrading my machine, but I'll hold off if syncing isn't
going to work.

No - its a bit of both but primarily Entourage and the way its
addressing sync services. The sync issues using sync services were in
2004 but we had a conduit. When I tried sync services about a year ago
in 2004 and noticed it messed up (under Tiger) I went back to the
conduit. A fellow, who I haven't seen here for a long time, who wrote
an excellent script for moving data between the two said to avoid sync
services as it was flaky. However in 08 we have no choice as there's
no conduit. There are some workarounds to the sync problems. However
sync services is not nearly as nice as the conduit and can really mess
up your calendar/s. Microsoft is aware of the problems and is trying
to isolate what is going on. The tech reps don't have a lot of info
though but they continue to submit the issues to engineering.

When I say its a bit of both, even if you just use iCal, an issue,
different from Entourage's can creep up. Apple, according to
Markspace, is aware of these and is also working on it. Sync services
is a new service (Tiger) in OSX and was substantially rewritten in
Leopard. This resolved some things but introduced new problems. What
we're faced with here is growing pains. But we don't have the option
to use a conduit now to avoid this while they get it worked out.

What I've found is as long as I've only enabled one of the sync apps
in Entourage, in my case Calendar, as this is what I use the most it
is fairly stable and I don't get dups. Once I enable say Addressbook
using combine, if I modify an entry on my Palm or in iCal it will dup
in Entourage. There are other odd behaviors, some of which I know what
is causing them to occur, so I just avoid doing things in a certain
way (e.g. when you first combine iCal and Entourage Calendar, it will
dup all day events so before I do this, I delete the Entourage
calendar in iCal and Entourage will just recreate it without all day
event dups and they don't seem to come back).

 

[Jesse David Hollington]

The Sync Services integration in 12.0.0 was *very* badly broken, and 12.0.1
seems to have mostly fixed these issues.

The few remaining issues that I am having with duplicates seems to be timing
related. Entourage doesn't necessarily sync as quickly with Sync Services
as it should, and if you therefore take an external device like a Palm or
even an iPhone and sync it in relatively short succession then it's possible
for duplicates to appear. I can reproduce this problem almost consistently
at this point.

For example, if I change an appointment in my Entourage calendar, and then
*immediately* sync my iPhone to it, chances are good that I will end up with
a duplicate appointment -- the old (unchanged) appointment from the device
gets transferred back in before Entourage has had a chance to properly
resync the changes from it's end, and it therefore doesn't recognize a
"changed" appointment and creates a duplicate, since the synced timing on
the device version gets updated before Entourage has a chance to touch it.
On the other hand, if I make a change in Entourage and wait a few minutes
before syncing my device, I have no such problems, as Entourage has then had
a chance to update the sync services database before anything else touches
that record.

Obviously Entourage should be handling conflict resolution more effectively,
but I suspect they may be erring perhaps a bit too much on the side of
caution -- the logic being that a duplicate event is preferable to a lost
event...

 

[Kerry]

The Sync Services integration in 12.0.0 was *very* badly broken, and 12.0.1
seems to have mostly fixed these issues.

The few remaining issues that I am having with duplicates seems to be timing
related.  Entourage doesn't necessarily sync as quickly with Sync Services
as it should, and if you therefore take an external device like a Palm or
even an iPhone and sync it in relatively short succession then it's possible
for duplicates to appear.  I can reproduce this problem almost consistently
at this point.

For example, if I change an appointment in my Entourage calendar, and then
*immediately* sync my iPhone to it, chances are good that I will end up with
a duplicate appointment -- the old (unchanged) appointment from the device
gets transferred back in before Entourage has had a chance to properly
resync the changes from it's end, and it therefore doesn't recognize a
"changed" appointment and creates a duplicate, since the synced timing on
the device version gets updated before Entourage has a chance to touch it.
On the other hand, if I make a change in Entourage and wait a few minutes
before syncing my device, I have no such problems, as Entourage has then had
a chance to update the sync services database before anything else touches
that record.

Obviously Entourage should be handling conflict resolution more effectively,
but I suspect they may be erring perhaps a bit too much on the side of
caution -- the logic being that a duplicate event is preferable to a lost
event...  

I see you have done a change in Entourage and then sync it across. You
feel this is a timing issue. I'm assuming you have both addressbook
and iCal sync'g turned on. Have you tried this in the reverse - a
change in either iCal or your iPhone and then seeing how the sync goes
back into Entourage. This is the problem I have if I have Addressbook
sync'g turned on with iCal. If I change/modify an event in iCal or the
Palm, it immediately syncs that to Entourage and dups either the task
or the event. I don't see how timing would change this. Once you
change iCal or do a sync from, in my case the Palm, it immediately
sync's to Entourage and the dup appears.

 

[Jesse David Hollington]

I see you have done a change in Entourage and then sync it across. You
feel this is a timing issue. I'm assuming you have both addressbook
and iCal sync'g turned on. Have you tried this in the reverse - a
change in either iCal or your iPhone and then seeing how the sync goes
back into Entourage. This is the problem I have if I have Addressbook
sync'g turned on with iCal. If I change/modify an event in iCal or the
Palm, it immediately syncs that to Entourage and dups either the task
or the event. I don't see how timing would change this. Once you
change iCal or do a sync from, in my case the Palm, it immediately
sync's to Entourage and the dup appears.

Yes, I have both Address Book and Calendar syncing enabled, with the iPhone
and Address Book/iCal as the only sync clients other than Entourage itself.

*Modifications* made on the iPhone or in iCal to *existing* appointments
seems to be a bit problematic, and I haven't entirely tracked this down as
it's not at all consistent. The problems I have seem to be that the change
sometimes simply doesn't show up *at all* -- the appointment stays as it was
in Entourage originally, and then a subsequent sync overwrites the original
Entourage appointment back into iCal and onto the device.

I still suspect a timing issue, but it may be timing that is beyond the
user's control. Any *new* appointments created in either application come
through fine, however (something that was most definitely broken in the
previous version).

I've played around a bit with Syncrospector to try and diagnose this and
watch when syncs are occurring. Entourage's Sync Services behaviour is
definitely weird, and when I mention that it's a timing issue, I'm not
assuming that it's something the user should really be able to control (or
be *expected* to control anyway ).

The fact that in your case turning Address Book syncing off seems to solve
the problem would also tie in to that, since some of the odd behaviour that
Syncrospector is showing seems to indicate that Entourage's syncing of the
address book and calendar entries occur in different cycles, and the
calendar sync seems to get delayed/disabled while the address book sync is
occurring. It's an interesting clue, and I'm going to have to try turning
off address book syncing to see if that helps in any meaningful way.

The Palm conduit of course introduces a separate wrinkle into the process,
as that's yet-another-sync-client, which is going to potentially complicate
things even further by adding another sync into the process.

At this point I've gone so far as to completely reset my entire sync
services engine -- basically erasing the Truth database completely and
starting over with the calendar data in Entourage as authoritative. It
hasn't completely fixed the problem, but it seems to be far less frequent
now, if perhaps for no other reason than the fact that the sync services
Truth database is much smaller than it was before, and therefore takes less
time to mingle changes.